66 Facts About Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow was born on 1971 and is an American video game designer and programmer.

Jonathan Blow is best known for his work on the independent video games Braid and The Witness.

Jonathan Blow studied computer science and English at the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out to start a game company.

Jonathan Blow co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and wrote a monthly technical column for Game Developer magazine.

Jonathan Blow used its financial success to fund his next game, The Witness, and formed a company called Thekla Inc After a lengthy development period, The Witness was released in 2016, and like Braid was critically and financially successful.

Jonathan Blow began designing and creating a new programming language.

Jonathan Blow was featured in Indie Game: The Movie, and is known for his strong opinions about the gaming industry.

Jonathan Blow's father worked as a defense contractor for TRW, and his mother was an ex-nun.

Jonathan Blow is the fourth of five siblings, having two brothers and two sisters.

Jonathan Blow was raised as a Christian and said his family regularly attended church.

Jonathan Blow went to middle school in Northern San Diego County.

When his parents noticed his interest, they bought him a TRS-80 Color Computer, on which Jonathan Blow learned to program in BASIC, often using exercise books from RadioShack.

In 1989, Jonathan Blow attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, double-majoring in computer science and English.

Jonathan Blow started as a physics major but switched to computer science because he "just felt called in that direction".

Jonathan Blow was a member and president of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association, as well as the eXperimental Computing Facility, an undergraduate computer-interest organization.

Jonathan Blow spent five years at UC Berkeley but dropped out with less than one semester to go.

In early 1996, Jonathan Blow co-founded the game company Bolt-Action Software, which was based in Oakland, California, with Bernt Habermeier, whom Jonathan Blow had met in the eXperimental Computing Facility.

In 2002, Jonathan Blow co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the Game Developers Conference, which showcases game prototypes that include new mechanics or that are new video game genres or mediums.

Jonathan Blow pitched them a proof of concept of a physics-intensive, online, multiplayer game about giant robots attacking a town.

Jonathan Blow said of this part of his life; "I was just stumbling forward like people do sometimes, and doing the best that I knew how to do, which at that time was programming".

Jonathan Blow created a prototype for a 2D puzzle-platform game involving time manipulation in December 2004.

Much of the work was done part-time because Jonathan Blow did consulting work and martial arts training.

Jonathan Blow felt the graphics and art style of the first version of the game "looked extremely amateur", and hired David Hellman to create all of the game's art.

In mid-2007, Jonathan Blow signed with Microsoft to release Braid via its distribution platform XBLA.

Jonathan Blow felt time spent meeting the XBLA certification process would have been better spent polishing the game, but he noted Microsoft was "very hands-off" with game design, and that "the final game is exactly what I wanted to put there".

Jonathan Blow estimated he spent more than $180,000 of his own money to develop Braid.

In 2010, Jonathan Blow co-founded funding organization Indie Fund together with some other successful independent game developers.

Jonathan Blow appeared in the documentary film Indie Game: The Movie, in which he discusses his experiences developing and releasing Braid.

In 2014 Jonathan Blow stated sales of Braid had earned more than $4 million, which he used to fund The Witness.

Jonathan Blow wanted to create a game using non-verbal communication; the puzzle rules are never explained with words but the puzzles themselves teach the player the rules.

Jonathan Blow felt solving puzzles in this way could generate epiphanies for players, and tried to design the game so the player experiences "miniature epiphanies over and over again".

Jonathan Blow estimated solving every puzzle in the game would take more than 80 hours.

Jonathan Blow created prototypes of several game ideas before choosing the one he liked the most, despite it being a 3D game which he "absolutely didn't want to do".

Jonathan Blow hoped to release The Witness in 2013 as a launch title for the Sony PlayStation 4, but the goal passed as the scope of the game increased.

Jonathan Blow reported that the first week sales revenue of The Witness totaled over US$5 million, and was one of the top downloads on illegal BitTorrent websites.

In September 2014, Jonathan Blow delivered a talk on his Twitch channel about the possibility of a new programming language designed for game development.

Jonathan Blow evaluated alternative systems-level programming languages such as Go and Rust, but ultimately expressed the desire to create a new language.

Jonathan Blow said the language would be relatively easy to create compared to creating a game like The Witness.

In 2014, Jonathan Blow began designing the language, which is codenamed Jai, and started creating a compiler for it.

In 2023, Jonathan Blow described the game as "the biggest single-player puzzle game that anybody's ever made", and estimated that it would take over 400 hours for a player to complete.

Jonathan Blow said the remaster will be faithful to the original, saying Braid will not get any "Greedo shoots first" changes.

Jonathan Blow was frustrated with the weak reception to the launch, saying Anniversary Edition "sold like dogshit" and that Thekla could not afford to pay any of its employees.

In 2013, Jonathan Blow began making a prototype for a single-player game that was not a puzzle game.

Jonathan Blow intends for Thekla to make the game using the game engine being developed for the Sokoban game, once it has matured.

Jonathan Blow noted one of his goals for the project is to expand his design abilities.

Jonathan Blow's games are known for being artistic, challenging, and not following industry trends.

Jonathan Blow's games have higher budgets and longer development times than most independently funded games, and have custom game engines.

Jonathan Blow created a custom game engine for both games, which in the case of The Witness took a large amount of development time.

Jonathan Blow noted that when development of The Witness began, off-the-shelf engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine were not sufficiently capable to build the game.

Jonathan Blow noted that he tries to make games which stand the test of time, so owning his own engine means he can continue to provide the game to people in contrast to off-the-shelf engines that come with no such guarantee.

Jonathan Blow said when he makes a game, he tries to make something he would want to play and be interested in.

Jonathan Blow wants to understand the world from many perspectives, and tries to uncover and understand truths about the universe through game design.

Jonathan Blow described an ideal player of his games as someone who "is inquisitive and likes to be treated as an intelligent person".

Jonathan Blow founded Thekla because he wanted creative freedom rather than out of aspiration to run a company.

Jonathan Blow used almost all of the profits of Braid to independently fund The Witness, noting that by doing so he had total creative freedom and thereby would not have to adjust the game to please the whims of a publisher.

Jonathan Blow has been characterized by VentureBeat as having a "reputation for doing outstanding work", and is known for voicing his opinions about the gaming industry.

Jonathan Blow has been described as a "prickly genius", and as the game industry's "most cerebral developer, but as its most incisive and polarizing internal critic".

Stephen Totilo of Kotaku said Jonathan Blow's criticism is not targeted towards individuals or specific games but industry trends.

Jonathan Blow thinks there are individual elements of storytelling which work well in games, including mood, character and setting; but considers games to be a terrible medium for storytelling in general.

Jonathan Blow considers social network games evil, and noted while SimCity and FarmVille appear superficially similar, SimCity is a creative activity that involves problem solving while FarmVille is about retaining the player's attention for as long as possible.

Jonathan Blow noted Stephen's Sausage Roll, a game he thought in 2017 "may be the best puzzle of all time", was rarely discussed in development circles, indicating a stagnation of the development scene.

Jonathan Blow considers much of current software to be of low quality.

Jonathan Blow began kung fu training when he began working on Braid, doing 15 hours a week towards the end of development.

Jonathan Blow is an avid dancer, and went out dancing several nights a week during the development of The Witness.

Jonathan Blow discovered that dancing helps him generate ideas, and during the 1990s took a notebook to clubs to write down programming ideas that would come to him on the dance floor.

Only games where Jonathan Blow has had a major role in development are included below.